International Sanctions and Constitutional Compliance

Judging governments' responses to international sanctions based on their compliance with a universal human rights standard can be criticized as an imposition of Western values. We propose an alternative benchmark for government action that is not subject to the same potential criticism: whether governments comply with their own national constitutions as codified forms of the social contract. Our analysis of 182 countries from 1962 to 2022 using state-of-the-art panel DiD and event study estimators corroborates our theoretical expectation that government responses depend on regime type. Whereas democracies improve their constitutional compliance under sanction pressure, autocracies start complying even less. These results suggest that sanctions can only make governments comply with their legal commitments if those governments are dependent on broad popular support.